Page 167 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

ProfitsfromWhittling

I

N 1915 , A. O. Dinsdale (O’Dee to his friends) was an ambitious young man
who had just been graduated from the California School of Fine Arts and the
Berkeley School of Arts and Crafts. He was determined to become a painter
equaling Michelangelo. But the war changed all that. After serving in France,
Dinsdale returned to San Francisco restless and unsettled. He went up into the
high Sierras and isolated himself in a crude cabin twenty miles upgrade. Here
he aimlessly whittled out queer little animals and painted them. A hunter
chancing on his retreat saw these animals and chuckled. “They’ve got
personality,” he said. “Send ’em down to the art shops. They’ll sell.”

Dinsdale followed this advice and his animals became a fad. He grew so busy
painting pink elephants and purple lions that he had no time to bemoan
shattered ambitions. Returning to town he purchased a band saw and cut his
creatures out of three-ply pine, painting them in oils. Because his art
education had included a thorough study of anatomy, his animals were
proportionately right despite their whimsicalities and gaudy hues.

Business expanded. In his garage he worked out nursery interiors and store
displays: “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” for instance, for a juvenile
shoe department. Dinsdale called his workshop the O’Dee Studio and
designed a black cat and blackbird trade-mark because his recently acquired
wife considered black cats “good luck.”

Years passed. Today the O’Dee Studio is located downtown and equipped
with the latest machinery. Animals have been left far behind in Dinsdale’s
“March of Progress.” His unusual profession takes in decorative relief maps
for vast projects, mechanical displays timed to light and sound, caricatures,
and unusual animated exhibits.

Strange assignments come to Dinsdale, one of these being his group of
historical displays created for the Wells Fargo Bank Museum. True to scale
and history these dramatic tableaux in wood vie in interest with the valuable